2 January 2014

As I wrote about Nine to Five a couple of days ago I kept thinking about all the categories within the genre of female buddy movies — the road movie, the wedding/bridesmaid comedy, etc. — but this one doesn’t fit into any category, except camp. It’s a retelling of Some Like It Hot(1958), except in this case Connie (Nia Vardalos) and Carla (Toni Collette) are already women, so when they go on the lam to escape the bad guys, they disguise themselves as drag queens.

Maybe I wouldn’t have liked Connie and Carla so much if I hadn’t been searching for female buddy comedies amongst such gems as Britney Spears’ Crossroads (rating = 3.1 on IMDB), Bratz: The Movie (2.4 on IMDB), or The House Bunny, in which a Playboy bunny finds a place to live in a sorority house (kill me now). Maybe. Still: I loved it.

To start, they throw themselves into their dinner theater act at the Chicago airport with ridiculous energy, no matter their audiences’ lack of interest. They ricochet through their medley of wildly incongruous show tunes and on-stage costume changes, from “Oklahoma!” to “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “Papa Can You Hear Me?” (from Yentl) to “Memories” (from Cats), all with the self-seriousness of two women who have had the same dream since they were kids.

Just because they witnessed a murder doesn’t mean they have any intention of finding a new dream.

Racing away from the bad guys, knowing that they’ll be hunted down, the two performers know one thing: “We gotta go some place where we can just blend in. Somewhere where they’d never look for us, because there’s no theater, no musical theater, no dinner theater, no culture at all.” They pause, and Carla comes up with the solution: “Los Angeles!”

It’s no surprise, then, that when they audition at the Handlebar in full drag — and actually sing their own songs rather than lip-sync like all the other contestants (Collette and Vardalos have great voices, and harmonize gorgeously and loudly together) — they’re embraced by the other queens as having real talent. It doesn’t hurt that both women look like queens without hamming it up, especially Collette, whose crazily big eyes and mouth are so perfectly suited for drag makeup that she actually scales back the broadness of her comedy because to be less subtle would go over the top. Soon they’ve created a popular new show they call “It’s A Drag (Pun Intended!)” which I would march out to see this minute.

I figure that a tale as silly as this one needs to skirt a couple of rocks and hard places: first, it needs to avoid appearing to simply use drag culture for cheap laughs; and second, it needs to avoid using drag culture as an opportunity for teaching a Very Special Lesson About Acceptance. It achieves the first better than the second, because a major subplot reveals that their beloved upstairs neighbor Peaches (Stephen Spinella) broke all ties long ago with his intolerant family, but his little brother Jeff (David Duchovny, who’s perfectly cute but zzzzzzzz) now wants to rebuild their relationship even though he feels an obvious distaste for Peaches’ feminine side and everything associated with the Handlebar’s drag culture.

For the most part the film keeps this subplot relatively light, since it’s also an opportunity for Connie to fall for Jeff and to find it difficult to maintain her drag persona around him. Can she get him to fall for her, even if he thinks she’s a man? Eat your heart out, Shakespeare and As You Like It.

More important than these narrative/casting missteps is the fact that Connie and Carla is a love letter to drag culture and the outré world of dinner theater, and it slips in some blowsy female self-empowerment along the way, too. As the performers start to build increasingly adoring audiences at the Handlebar, they start to pepper their act with banter that celebrates femininity and self-acceptance while also getting delivered with a knowing wink from these women-disguised-as-men-who-dress-as-women.

In fact, when Connie wonders aloud at an odd moment backstage whether they ought to go on diets, Carla whips her huge, makeuped face around and sets her straight: “All these women come to our show and idolize us because as men we have better self-esteem than they do!” (The diet gets nixed.)

What can I say? With great singing, all those show tunes, pretty terrific acting from Vardalos and Collette, and a goofily madcap gender-bending storyline written by Vardalos (as her follow-up to My Big Fat Greek Wedding), Connie and Carla is ridiculous but entirely enjoyable. Don’t believe those snarky reviews written by the critics when it came out — assholes! — trust the people at Logo TV who’ve got it on regular rotation. Maybe it won’t win any prizes (except one for wigs and makeup from the Canadian Network of Makeup Artists) but I’m going to put this on my shortlist of movies to watch when I’m feeling a little blue. Because Connie and Carla know how to sing through the pain — and I’ve got a drag queen buried deep inside me just itching to get out. If only I could sing like C&C.

25 September 2013

So I’m already deep into the semester with a new lecture class, which means I spend most of my time prepping, grading, and hyperventilating. This makes it all the more important that I can watch an episode of Orange is the New Blackon Netflixevery couple of days to decompress. Because if there’s ever a show that overturned every hoary teevee trope, it’s the way this one has told a new story about women’s prison.

This show is amazing, and I’m pretty sure it was created because someone read my blog and said, “Let’s throw this bitch a bone: a show about women’s prison with a whole bunch of unknown actors of various races, sizes, and sexual orientations. This blogger will lose her shit.”

Which is pretty much what has happened. I only wish I had time to sit down and watch it all in a single popcorn and martini-fueled binge weekend. From the opening credits all the way through every single 60-minute rich episode, I’m in heaven.

If this seems at first like yet another story of a blonde girl who finds herself in strange and comical circumstances, you haven’t watched what’s really happening here. Sure, our protagonist is a WASPy blonde upper-middle class woman named Piper (Taylor Schilling) who enters the prison because a while back she transported drug money for a girlfriend — and the show gets a lot of its early raison d’être from Piper’s wide-eyed introduction to prison realities. Whoa, a Black woman they call Crazy Eyes (Uzo Aduba) forms a crush on Piper! What will she do? Whoa, everyone in prison huddles in groups by race! Will Piper hang out with only white women?

But it doesn’t take long before you realize that this is only partly a show about Piper, especially as successive episodes dedicate themselves to complex backstories for each of the key inmates. In fact, we should have anticipated this from the beginning, for the opening credits — featuring a montage of the faces of real and former female inmates — gives us intimate images of the eyes and freckles and piercings and wrinkles of real, non-WASPy faces.

While Piper tries to maintain a relationship with her risk-averse fiancé Larry (Jason Biggs) — who goes on living a spectacularly comfortable New York life — her fellow inmates’ lives and intrigues become far more compelling. There’s the post-op trans Sophia (Laverne Cox), the prison’s hair stylist, whose estrogen pills are curtailed during budget cuts, and who forms a prickly, unlikely relationship with the incarcerated nun with the hope that she can persuade the nun to hand over her post-menopausal hormones. Cox plays this role with an extraordinary delicacy, particularly in scenes with Sophia’s family back home — the wife and son who remain supportive, despite the fact that she failed them when she used stolen credit cards to pay for the sex reassignment surgery.

Even the vindictive, whisper-tiny Bible-thumping redneck and former meth addict, Tiffany (Tamryn Manning), who gets played as more of a heavy than most of the characters, proves to have a method to her madness.

Question: will Tamryn Manning ever get another role after this besides as Bible-thumping crazies with rotted teeth and strong Southern accents?

Among my Facebook friends there has been nothing but expressions of fast-burning love for Alex (Laura Prepon, formerly of the unwatchable That 70s Show and one of the very few recognizable faces here). Alex isn’t just tall, dark, and blessed with those eyebrows. Nor is she merely a woman who knows how to throw her shoulders back, how to level a heavy-lidded direct gaze at a gal, and how to choose a great pair of specs.

She’s also Piper’s former lover — the one who ran the drug cartel operations, the one who asked Piper to carry the money, and maybe the one who gave Piper’s name to the Feds … felicitously tossed into the same prison. She’s that one — The One? — with whom Piper carried on a long, passionate relationship charged in part by the riskiness of their work and the glamour of all that money. One look at Alex and I dare you not to start fantasizing. We know immediately that poor Larry, the hapless fiancé, has got himself a problem.

Yes, Alex is one of those perfect fantasy objects, for whom no stint in prison is going to alter her impeccable eyebrow maintenance or lipstick choices. Yes, perhaps not all of us would run into such a vision while in prison. Yes, this feels a lot like one of those “let’s tempt our viewers to want Piper to go gay again!” kinds of teevee moments.

But although her character is used to forward the plot in particular ways (and to send my Facebook friends into orgasms of thrill), Alex is not the story here. Nor is Piper the story. The real story is the new narratives of possibility opened up by focusing on women.

This goes so far beyond the famous Bechdel Test — that incredibly low standard for gauging how much a film gives a single thought to women — that you wonder whether you can ever go back to stomaching the rest. Let me just focus on one tiny thing here: women of different races in conversation with each other, in proximity to one another, fighting with/ hating/ distrusting/ accommodating/ getting to know one another.

Think about it. Can you think of any show, ever, in which this happened?

So yes, creators of Orange is the New Black: my mind is officially blown. And best of all, Piper gradually becomes something very different than that wide-eyed woman who was immediately the favorite of the seemingly soft-hearted counsellor Healy. I can hardly wait for Season 2.

25 May 2013

Women’s basketball phenomenon Brittney Griner has been an out lesbian since her freshman year in high school, but most fans only learned about it after an interview she did last month with Sports Illustrated. Turns out that’s because her university told her to be quiet about it.

She now chalks it up to recruiting — coaches told her that parents wouldn’t let their kids come to Baylor if it appeared this private, religious, conservative university condoned the gay, as she explains in an interview with ESPN.

Because Baylor, which has “affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm,” explains in its sexual misconduct rules that “Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching” and that the university will “strive to deal in a constructive and redemptive manner with all who fail to live up to this high standard.”

Which raises a few interesting questions. First, did anyone at the university ever tell Griner she had “failed” to adhere to their rules for sexual conduct, and seek to “deal” with her? Second, did the university set those standards aside in Griner’s case — because she was, after all, leading the women’s basketball team to glory — but not in the case of other LGBTQ students who, like Griner, are gay in plain sight? And finally, will the public acknowledgment of Griner’s out identity change the anti-gay culture at Baylor, given that people will ask these questions?

26 March 2013

For four years now I’ve been a old-fashioned fangirl for Brittney Griner, the basketball standout at Baylor University. And this year I have something kind of amazing to hope for: that she might beat the all-time women’s college basketball scoring record, which has been locked up for twelve years. Griner’s currently holding at #2 as Baylor makes its way through the women’s college basketball version of March madness. If Baylor keeps winning, and if Griner keeps having these amazing scoring nights, she might just beat it.

In 2001 the amazing Jackie Stiles of Southwest Missouri State finished her senior year with a grand total of 3,393 points — blowing away the previous record (Patricia Hoskins of Mississippi Valley State, who had ended her senior year with 3,122 points twelve years earlier). Stiles’ record is all the more impressive because she was a full foot shorter than Griner — at 5’8″, Stiles is the shortest of the 8 women to score over 3,000 points in their college careers.

For Griner to beat Stiles’ record is almost impossible: she needs to score 157 more points, and at best Baylor has only 5 more games left in the tournament. That works out to, on average, about 31 points per game. Whew — 31 points per game. Criminey.

Almost impossible. Or is it?

Don’t you want to know whether she can do it? I do.

So why dontcha watch with me? Baylor is matched up tonight against #8 Florida State — 10pm EST. Let’s follow this one into history.

[By the way: a previous version of this post got the numbers wrong (hey, I wasn’t a math major) — I had thought she had only 4 more games, and hence had to score 40 points per. Correction made!]

(I still get those crazy searches, BTW — every single day. But lately I’ve been extra pleased to see that people are misspelling her last name slightly — they’ve been calling her Brittney Grinder. Which gives me no end of happiness to think that they’re also ending up at Grindr, and that they’re getting a little bit of an education in social networking. [Happy.]

12 October 2012

Holy shit. This film about the long AIDS crisis in San Francisco should be required viewing, it’s so good. It is grueling — I went through ten double-strength tissues and was reduced to sobbing at several points — but it does this by focusing on the personal experiences of five remarkable individuals who survived the epidemic by doing something about it.

Sometimes when I talk with my students about this part of our recent history, I realize they have no sense of several things. First, the joyousness with which so many gay men inhabited San Francisco during the 1970s and early 80s, finally finding a place where they felt at home. Second, the way that the slowly-moving news of a mysterious “gay cancer” affected all people, both gay and straight. Sex could kill you — a point that moralistic bigots like Jerry Falwell did not fail to remind us of, as if most of us required new reasons to feel guilt and shame. And finally, that this epidemic raged for so long that it couldn’t help but demoralize the people fighting hardest to find a cure, those who saw their friends dying all around them.

A lot of what we remember now is governmental inaction, like Reagan’s refusal to acknowledge the disease until late in his second term, or the drug companies’ shameful privileging of profits. But for this documentary those stories (like the ones Randy Shilts exposed with And the Band Played On in 1987) remain subsidiary to the experiences of these five remarkable individuals.

David Weissman’s We Were Here shows that real people — ordinary people — made a difference. It is truly the best example of showing that we are not pawns in a big game of life, subject to the whims of the powerful and the grand forces of history. In a massive, guerrilla, grassroots effort, real people in the Bay Area changed the course of treatment, caregiving, community-building, and memorialization of the dead. They changed the course of political action to change public health practices.

This documentary leaves you with an abiding respect for these ordinary people who fought and protested and risked so much to do the right thing. Tears are still dripping out of my eyes as I write this, for the film is truly that wrenching. As I watched it I wept for my dead friends and my surviving friends and my own young adult years witnessing those men grow sick and waste away. I am so glad, and so proud, to have had the chance to hear these five individuals’ stories.

6 October 2012

If there’s one film trope that needs to be shot in the head, it’s the one in which a lesbian switches sexual sides in order to serve as the psychological healer/ self-actualizer for a guy, then conveniently goes away. (Chasing Amy [1997]: I’m lookin’ at you. Even worse: Three of Hearts [1993].)

The good news is that writer-director Lynne Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister is not that film. The lesbian here is neither cardboard cutout nor fantasy object nor deus ex machina. She doesn’t go away. The bad news: once you peel away the tight dialogue, the great acting, and the enviable scenery, it’s not very far away from that trope.

Jack (Mark Duplass) is a mess. A year after his brother’s death, he still gets drunk at parties and insults everybody, including the memory of his brother. This behavior leads his best friend Iris (Emily Blunt), who used to date his brother and who seems perhaps a bit maternal toward Jack, to send him to her family’s cabin out on one of the San Juan Islands off the coast of Seattle for a solitary retreat to get his life back together.

Which reminds me to ask: why don’t my best friends have magical family cabins on islands? Do I not have need of self-actualizing retreats? Selfish friends.

But when he arrives at the house at night, the house already has a surprise inhabitant: Iris’s half-sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who has just split up with her longtime girlfriend. Having finally come to terms with serious flaws in that relationship, Hannah’s almost as much at loose ends as Jack. So, naturally, they open a bottle of tequila and, in a drink-off, confess their sins to one another — relative strangers — across the table in an ugly, self-deprecating night of catharsis.

When the ordinarily withdrawn Hannah confesses that her partner’s callousness and infidelity has left her feeling unattractive, the very drunk Jack insists she’s perfectly hot. So much so that he’s willing to tell her — in very funny detail — because he knows her gayness won’t lead them to have sex. But in an uncharacteristic moment of risk-taking, she agrees to sex. What follows is one of the most unappealing, and utterly realistic, sex scenes between drunk people in the history of film. (You’ll be relieved to hear that this scene is also realistically short.)

So far so good, eh? There’s no risk of Hannah switching sides. Their sex is so impulsive and unpleasant (especially for her) that we know this is merely something to be embarrassed about down the road. But when Iris shows up the next morning and they decide to hide it from her, the narrative takes a strange twist toward ménage à trois.

I found the tale thus far to be charming, especially considering the director’s super-low budget (would you believe $125,000? did Shelton pay these actors at all?), the great scenery, and the endless appeal of stories about screwed-up individuals accidentally helping one another. I particularly liked the moments between the two half-sisters: the endearingly sweet, enthusiastic, little-sister Iris cuddling up to her older sister to chat in late-night hours.

If the dialogue seems a bit too clever in that CW Channel vein of overly scripted repartee, the ultimate stakes of the narrative aren’t very high. In fact, the tale gets a teensy bit mired in the “will they confess their drunken night of debauchery?” question, especially after Iris confesses to her sister that she thinks she’s in love with Jack, the brother of her now-dead ex-boyfriend. But hey, low stakes can be okay with me — not all movies have to be about world-changing ideas. Hell, this film is funny and the three individuals are appealing and good in dialogue with one another. Still, at midpoint Your Sister’s Sister feels a little bit like a short story stretched out over 90 minutes.

But when Iris learns the truth it all goes south — the three of them spin far apart from one another, with Iris blaming both of them for … some kind of perfidy she can’t articulate. (Warning: spoilers to follow, in which I reveal what I find distasteful about this portrayal of a lesbian onscreen!)

Unlike the horrors of homophobic films of the 1990s (again, Chasing Amy, one of the films I hate the most), this film doesn’t make Hannah’s gayness an issue or some kind of histrionic roadblock. Neither does this film pretend that a ménage à trois featuring a lesbian is some kind of risqué, challenging theme. Thank goodness for small favors as the progress of gay rights has rendered such narratives less viable.

Instead, it does something else I find annoying: in a big plot twist, Your Sister’s Sister turns Hannah into a woman so desperate to have a child that her drunken night of sex may, in fact, have been a ploy to get pregnant — a revelation that leads Jack to express huffy outrage as if she has somehow stolen his sperm, and which makes him leave the house on his bike, a form of physical exertion clearly new to his body. Most important, any possible romance between the two straight people appears dashed. The film turns into a straight-up love story between Jack and Iris that Hannah has ruined.

My problem isn’t simply that Jack would be a reluctant potential father, nor that a gay woman would want a child. My problem is that Hannah’s contrivance to get pregnant turns into the primary narrative dynamite destroying a weak and slightly annoying love story between the two straight people. Because that’s what this film ultimately becomes: a love story with a little ménage of lesbian thrown in, insofar as the lesbian functions as a reluctant partner in the threesome.

Honestly, this is where we’ve come? Straight man creates romantic problems for himself by sleeping with the sister of his true love interest? One could sum it up with a big “yuck.”

An ancillary problem is Mark Duplass, whom I quite liked in Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) as an unhinged inventor in search of a time-traveling companion (as well as Humpday [2009]). He’s good in independent comedy, as he’s capable of moments of real seriousness and has a nice talent to portray men slightly disgusted with themselves. But he doesn’t quite have what it takes to face off against actors as talented as Blunt and DeWitt. Nor does he appear capable of transforming from self-hating shlub to a man capable of responsibility or generosity.

Emily Blunt, on the other hand, is the film’s real center, primarily due to her ridiculous, approachable appeal. If I were in a sloppier mood I’d say she’s Hollywood’s new Sandra Bullock — one of those crazily beautiful women with a capacity to seem available even to shlubs — except that Blunt has an actorly range that has put her on a crazy upward spiral for several years now. She has appeared to great effect in everything from in top-shelf sci-fi bits like The Adjustment Bureau and Looper to period dramas like The Young Victoria to indie comedies like The Five-Year Engagement to romantic dramas like Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. The minute she appears onscreen, you know the quality of the film will tick up by a good ten points.

And when will Rosemarie DeWitt get her place in the sun? She’s excelled in small roles for a long while now — in Mad Men as Don’s freewheeling artist girlfriend in Season 1; in a bit role in Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret; and most notably as Anne Hathaway’s soon-to-be-married sister in Rachel Getting Married. As I learned from JustMeMike‘s nice review of this film, she got slotted into this role late in the project after Rachel Weisz backed out due to scheduling conflicts. DeWitt does a great job as the depressive, withdrawn Hannah. And for those of you following my obsession with bringing back real women’s noses onscreen, just look at how DeWitt’s beautiful nose helps to establish her beauty and distinctiveness. God forbid she do a Jennifer Gray and scale it back to one of those ubiquitous, indistinguishable buttons.

Ultimately, Your Sister’s Sister feels like a halfway covenant — a reassurance that we no longer live with the homophobic narratives of the 90s, and therefore a gesture of good will from straights to gays; but no clear sign that writers know how to develop stories in which gay and straight characters coexist and inform one another’s lives in ways that feel true. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a film well worth watching, particularly for its first half and the nice dialogue. But it left me sad and dissatisfied in the end, fearful that Hollywood narratives of love between straight people will only be spiced up by the addition of tertiary gay characters.

GLORIA SWANSON

2013 film & TV reviewed (with occasional late 2012 films)

Side Effects
House of Cards
The Invisible War
How to Survive a Plague
5 Broken Cameras
The Americans
Blancanieves
Top of the Lake
The Great Gatsby
Stories We Tell
The East
Before Midnight
A Girl and a Gun
The Bridge
The Bling Ring
The Heat
Elysium
In a World...
Orange is the New Black
The Fifth Estate
Enough Said
Populaire
The Wall
The Act of Killing
Twelve Years a Slave